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Folk Duo Pens Song for Sharlene Bosma

Ron and Jen Slocumb, who make up the folk duo Martha’s Trouble, will be performing their song "Prayer for a Broken Heart" in a special concert to be held on August 9 to honor the memory of murdered husband and father Tim Bosma.

The song, which has drawn widespread attention across Canada, is dedicated to Sharlene Bosma, the Ancaster, Ontario widow of Tim Bosma. The concert will be held in the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario.

Tim Bosma disappeared on May 6 after taking a pair of prospective buyers of a pickup he was trying to sell online for a test drive.

In the song dedicated to Bosma’s wife, Ron and Jen Slocumb begin by repeating the words Sharlene Bosma used to open the press conference she gave after learning police had located the body of her husband: “How can a man take the life of another man?”

Tim Bosma never returned home from that test drive and his remains were found about a week later burned beyond recognition at a south-western Ontario farm belonging to one of two men charged with first-degree murder in his death.

The frantic search for Bosma was news across Canada and the United States, drawing the attention of the Slocumbs who live in Opelika, Alabama.

Jen Slocumb had followed the case closely because, although she now lives in Alabama, she grew up in Ancaster, Ontario, home for the Bosmas.

“We didn’t know the Bosma family, but Ancaster is a small town like ... Opelika,” Jen Slocumb told a local newspaper. “When you’re from a community like that, you feel like you know them.”

Jen Slocumb and her husband were deeply moved by what Sharlene Bosma said at the press conference on the day after they found Tim Bosma.

The Slocumbs were inspired to write a song. Bouncing ideas and stanzas off one another, they worked through the night, penning the lyrics for “Prayer for A Broken Heart.”

Sharlene Bosma eventually heard the song and liked it and the news media picked up on it and the song went viral on the Internet, Ron Slocumb told the local newspaper.

Some of the lyrics refer to the Bosma’s two-year-old daughter and say:

“That little girl is gonna know
her daddy loved her so
but now he's been taken
won't get to see her grow.”

As their own show of support for the Bosma family, Martha’s Trouble is donating $1 (U.S.) to the In Memory Of Tim Bosma Fund each time “Prayer For the Broken Heart” is downloaded from

“Being able to follow the story every day online, we felt very emotionally attached to what was going on,” Jen Slocumb said to the local newspaper. “We weren’t really planning on writing a song about it, but it kind of just happened really quickly.